You can also buy special plastic bags you can fill with water, which are 'pre molded' to make ice cubes. No need to 'hurt' a regular zip lock bag and/or the table ;-)

Just fill them with water and put them in the freezer (and yes we do have freezers which are cold enough to make ice....) and later you can take out one ore more ice cubes.

Large chain hotels do have ice machines btw.

I would like to thank everybody for the help. If anybody would like suggestions on travel to the San Francisco Bay Area, feel free to ask me.

Often wondered why a lot of Americans have an obsession with ice, I lived in Minnesota for a couple of months and nearly all the bars I used to go to would serve ice cold beer in a glass that had just come out of a freezer and was coated in a quarter of a inch of ice, this was in the winter and it was usually around 20F outside and snowing.

Hooameye--cold kills the taste of beer, and that is what Americans got used to when home refrigerators began to spread in the 1920s and 1930s and beyond. Brewers finally figured out that, since beer drinkers were destroying the flavor of the beer anyway buy drinking it ice cold, they could increase profits by just making cheaper beer with fewer hops, simpler brewing methods, etc. Over the decades Americans got used to "dumbed-down" beer with less or no (e.g., almost all "lite" beers) flavor.

Of course now we have hundreds of craft beers to choose from that have restored flavor and variety to the American beer market--though I am still amazed when I go to someone's house and they serve me a really good craft beer at 40 degrees F. in an frozen mug!?!?!? Why pay the extra money for a really good beer and then freeze it to tastelessness?

Taste varies from one person to another as does judgement

The only reasonble way of drinking beer is cooled to slightly below room temperature. If you don't have a choice, warmer is better than cooler.

Depends on the style of beer. That classic American light golden lager tastes better very cold, even when it's well made (try Victory Lager). The great dumbing-down of classic American beer probably owes far more to the oil crisis and the great inflationary recession of the 1970's than it does to our predilection for drinking it nearly frozen. However, I think it's for drinking outside when it's 85, not in the middle of winter.

Actually... Acording to a documentary about beer on the History channel, the dumbing down of American beer is a direct result of Prohibition. Most of the little brewers went out of business and only the big companies remained. After Prohibition, the big brewers had a lock on the market and could pump out whatever cheap swill they chose. It was difficult for smaller brewers to get back into the market due to new laws and regulations. Within a generation, Americans no longer knew what real beer tasted like, so they accepted the crap produced by the big brewers.

Then in the 1970s, along came Anchor Brewing Co in San Francisco...And now 40 years later, the US is overflowing with great beer :)

Noticed this thread has been a little slow over the last year or two... so, where can I find ice cubes in the Netherlands? I'm getting ready to head out on a road trip and need to fill up my cooler with ice to bring along drinks and food!!

in the UK the larger supermarkets sell it.

that's where I'd try first.

Welcome to Fodors Jamie. Instead of tacking on to a 13 year old thread about Germany, you might want to start a new thread of your own and tag it for the Netherlands . . .